Hi,

Lots of companies are offering "unlimited domains, disk space, and bandwidth" to their customers. How can they do this? Even with VPS and cloud servers, it seems like this is not a sustainable business model.

I have heard that some companies have a maximum file amount in their SLA and use a script to monitor how many files are on an account. And they use this to limit the size of client account. However, what if a client starts saving 5 GB daily backups on their account? In 60 days they would be taking up 300 GB of disk space!

I have also heard that some hosting companies have a CPU monitor that monitors each clients CPU useage, and that in their SLA they have a "max CPU load" restriction. Is this true? If so can this be done with Linux servers running on a VPS or cloud?

They lie. Pure and simple.
They lie to their clients and they lie to potential clients.

Unlimited doesn't exist but lack of ethics is in abundance.

Some so called entrepreneurs will say anything to get business. The truth is irrelevant to these people.

It doesn't matter what arbitrary limits they put on other resources. When they offer any of their resources as unlimited they are lying.

There is nothing UNLIMITED . There are SLA agreements that say max CPU load or that the amount of power behind the VPS 1GB ram vs 4GB etc, there are limitations to what the server can serve.

Now how can they use this business model? Well they give to 80GB or even 500GB and most people only use a very small portion of that. They also bank on them over selling the equipment and available bandwidth.

If you believe you will be needing a custom solution ask questions, if you truly need unlimited resources you do not need to buy from someone that offers them. Get a dedicated server and have it managed or manage it yourself, it will have limitations amount of HD space, RAM, Size of incoming connection and any network bottlenecks between you and your hosting provider. If you need more than one server in one or more data centers load balanced. That is the only way to get beyond the limitations of one server.

Hope that helps

All I will say is.

My harddisk is not unlimited, however I can keep adding more disks, but over time I would be in serious trouble.

UNLIMITED = FAKE

Limited = true

You can offer unlimited and you can run it, you can just keep buying and buying more space, but I doubt it is worth it, or a good selling point, it is a joke.

As stated above, there is nothing in this world that it unlimited or never ending and such offers are simply a marketing ploy, in relation to disk space and or bandwidth. Commonly unlimited is also used for services such as sub domains, email accounts and databases however this ties more into the inability to predict or estimate an actual value as this depends on varying factors.

However this may be set to change for those companies registered within the UK as the ADA (Advertising Standards Authority) have recently announced their expansion for the control and governance of online advertising regulation.

These regulations will not only the companies own site but other third party space under their control, such as Facebook and Twitter or even forums such as HD. Article

Stupidity is.

Indeed that seems to be one of the only things in this world that is on the endless increase, along unfortunately with a number of other attitudes or mentalities that I need not mention. Nevertheless it remindes me somewhat of " Light Travels Faster Than Sound; This Is Why Some People appear Bright Until They Speak"

I completly agree. Providing unlimited space, bandwidth is practically not possible. For client acquisition companies implement such stratergies.

Unlimited hosts have limits, therefore it is not truly unlimited.

It's a marketing tool companies use to prey on the uninformed or the type of person that wants something for nothing.

Most people don't read the unlimited host's TOS or Acceptable Use Policy and have done little research regarding unlimited hosting (the uninformed), so they go with the unlimited companies that are on every Top 10 list on the Internet, only find out the hard way that there is in-fact a limit.

Others that want features of a dedicated server, but only want to pay a hosting fee comparable to a small shared plan (someone that wants something for nothing) go for unlimited plans, because they really think a cheap unlimited plan is going to allow them the space and bandwidth necessary to be the next YouTube/Facebook for $5 a month.

Oh, that made me smile first thing this morning.
Concerning unlimited - there are always restrictions, whether published in their TOS or not. Do your homework before you commit to a provider.

That is so true!

It is all a marketing ploy, nothing is unlimited. If you read the provider's TOS, most include some clause about a innode limit

I make a big thing of this on our site. We do NOT providing unlimited disk-space and unlimited bandwidth, because we offer performance and the two cannot co-exist together.

Unlimited = Overselling.

Performance = No Overselling.

Also, as people have pointed out, you have to backup this unlimited space, so effectively you need to have unlimited backup space, and that does not come cheap.

Finite Resource Owned / Infinate Resources Rented = Problems

We have customers to came to us because larger companies with their unlimited account kept shutting down small wordpress blogs!!

XeHSean mention innode limits, which does limit the number of files, but this is a good limit, I limit customers to 50,000 inodes per GB, otherwise they start stealing innodes from other customers.

Everyone here is correct. NOTHING is unlimited. Anyone who advertises using that term is falsely advertising.

I think what happens is, they hope that 95% of the customers will only use a handful of space so then they are free to offer "unlimited" space and bandwidth.

However, its been my experience that alot of the companies offering such a package usually disappear overnight or have terrible uptime/reliability issues.

I run a small hosting outfit in the UK and we do not offer unlimited space or bandwidth but we do offer unlimited subdomains and add on domains which of course is governed by disk space, so there is only so many web sites and resources that you can use.

I have found that even with our offer of unlimited add on domains, people rarely have more than a few.

I have thought about offering unlimited disk space in order to make things more attractive but I think its inviting trouble once the word gets out.